Competition is often considered as a threat by many business owners. However, it is not fully known whether it really is a threat or no. Gaining complete knowledge about your competitors is the key to success in today’s competitive business environment. For startups and new businesses, competitors could be viewed as an existence of matured market with already prevailing high demand for the product or service, giving an opportunity to introduce a better and improved product.

Paying a close attention to competitors can help you design or create a better product that might already exist in the market with a huge demand and huge competition. Starting a new business or entering a new market, assessing the competitive landscape is a must. This would give you a solid understanding of strategic development. Knowing competitors before beating them is the best strategy.

Identify Competitors

The first step in the competitive analysis is to identify competitors. It though looks easy but in reality, it may not be when you are foraying into a new territory. A simple trick would be to search in Google using three to four variations of keywords and see the businesses that are coming up on the first page and top results. These would be probably the prime competitors for your business.

Maintaining competitor records

The second step would be to create a list of competitors for analysis and gathering full business intelligence. For detailed competitive intelligence, a company can take help of specialized market research agencies such as iResearch Services that provides strategic competitive intelligence services including competitive benchmarking, competitor information, business intelligence, market intelligence, company information and more.

Developing new market

With the help of competitive analysis, a business can easily identify the market gaps that can be filled. For example, a product may be the hottest product in the country, but it may not be available outside the country and has a scope for an extended market outside the country internationally. Monitoring the competition closely helps but do not let it hamper your vision. You should always focus on driving value and meeting the requirements of your prospects or target audience.

Defining sales strategy

Knowing what promotional strategies competitors are offering to close the deals can help you create better sales strategies. Also, it is good to know if they are passing any message or value that core competitors often provide. Data collection about competitors and the trends in the market would definitely help the sales team to answer the questions, better branding and creating a good position in the market for the company.

Boosting marketing efforts

As a business, do not let your competitors outdo you in your marketing efforts. It is great to sign up on their websites for their newsletters, or subscribe to their blogs, or attend the webinars that they may be conducting periodically. Keep a tab on the information that they share about the topics they focus. Identifying the gap in the content, i.e., overdone topics and not done topics can help to get an edge where the competitors are lacking in creating content.

Gaining intelligence about competitors and the market is not as easy as it appears. Hence, it is always recommended to take help of a professional competitive intelligence services provider for accurate and better insights and in-depth knowledge about the competition.